A DVR (Digital Video Recorder, sometimes also referred to as a PVR, Personal Video Recorder) is a consumer electronics device or application software that records video in a digital format to a disk drive, USB flash drive, SD memory card, solid state drive (SSD) or other local or networked mass storage device.
Cloud storage is a model of data storage where the digital data is stored in logical pools, the physical storage may span multiple servers (and often locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a cloud storage provider. Cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment protected and running.
Cloud DVRs are similar to non-cloud DVRs, except that the storage function of the DVR has been removed to cloud storage. Typically, in such a model, a service provider which provides video to a subscriber also provides cloud based storage for the subscriber. While previous generations of cloud DVR solutions targeted the capture and storage of MPEG transport stream (TS) Media over IP Multicast, the next generation of IP based cloud DVR solutions is trending towards the capture and playback of time-series media objects transported over reliable transport (e.g. as adaptive bitrate content delivered over HTTP).
As a result of various court decisions and other legal constraints imposed by various regulatory agencies in the U.S.A., one copy of a recorded content item per recording user needs to be maintained by the service provider in a cloud storage environment. For example, if one thousand users all record a television program broadcast at one particular time, then the service provider would need to store one thousand copies of the recorded television program in cloud storage. When the Recording is based on time-series objects (i.e. discrete video “chunks”, as will be explained below), each user's copy of a discrete time-series object needs to be stored at a unique location in memory.